“The Piano’s Open”

You may remember Sophie Tucker’s or perhaps Dudu Fisher’s rendition of “Mein Yiddishe Mama,” but did you know that the song is rooted in an immigrant Jewish boy’s experience in a turn-of-the-twentieth-century synagogue in Buffalo, whose cantor, Shmuel Arluck, was the father of the famous composer Harold Arlen? And who knew that when he grew up that boy, Jack Yellin, would also write the lyrics to “Happy Days are Here Again”?

David Assaf’s new Ima yekara li (Mother, my dear mother) is full of surprises about dazzlingly talented twentieth-century Jewish composers, lyricists and singers working everywhere from Warsaw to Tel Aviv to New York. A sequel to his wondrous Shir hu lo rak milim (A song is more than words) which I reviewed in 2022, this new book has a somewhat more limited focus, but it is still vast in its scope. There are, after all, a lot of Yiddish and Hebrew songs about Mama/ima, and Assaf knows a tremendous amount about a very large number of them (maybe all of them).

The book begins on a non-musical note, with Assaf’s touching reminiscences of his own mother. Born in Warsaw in 1916 into a moderately religious and Zionist family, she made aliyah in the summer of 1939, rejoining her husband who had already paved their way. Had she heeded her parents, who urged her to wait until after the High Holy Days, she would probably never have gotten out. Assaf doesn’t tell us much about her subsequent life as a wife and mother, but after she became a widow she helped with his research, translating Yiddish documents. This reconnection with the language of her childhood afforded her enormous satisfaction, and “in an original way poured new content into my relationship with my mother.”

Unsurprisingly, the songs analyzed in Ima yekara li do not tend to depict such mature, collaborative mother-child relationships. Take, for example, the great Israeli songwriter Dan Almagor’s 1961 comedic song “My Chaim’ke.” A beloved staple in Israel, its lyrics express the amazement of Chaim’s mother that all the soldiers she’s watching on parade are marching out of step and wearing their insignia the wrong way—except for her boy! The rest of them, she declares, are all displaying their weapons, but only Chaim lets loose a bullet! All the other soldiers stiffly maintain their composure, and only Chaim calls out “Hey Mama, it’s me!” Only Chaim’ke, his mother concludes, “really loves his mother.”

Observers to whom this might seem like a most un-Israeli song, would be surprised to read how many men named Chaim in the Israeli entertainment world had to disabuse their friends of the idea that the song is actually about them. Diehard defenders of Israeli martial prowess will no doubt be relieved to learn that the song actually has foreign roots, as Almagor himself explained to Assaf. Back in 1961, when he was taking a course on Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University, his professor, the Russian-born but American-bred Simon Halkin (brother of Judeo-Arabist Abraham, uncle of essayist-translator Hillel Halkin), mentioned in passing an American song, from the Civil War era, in which a mother sings about her son Johnny, the only soldier in the platoon is marching in step. Thrilled by the idea, Almagor rushed up during the class break to get the name of the song. “Do you think I remember?” Halkin snapped.

Almagor searched for the song in histories of the Civil War and folk song anthologies. He contacted American friends and experts, including Pete Seeger, but to no avail. Months later, he asked the Israeli composer and lyricist Moshe Wilensky whether he happened to have heard of it. How long have you been looking for it, Wilensky asked him. Almost half a year, he said. “‘Half a year,’ Wilensky said smilingly. ‘I know how fast you work. In half an hour, you could write a song like that yourself. . . . You’re already here, the piano’s open. Grab a piece of paper and write the song. I promise that I’ll compose the tune for it quickly.’” And in half an hour, says Almagor, the song was born.

Having seen the archives, Assaf says that it must in fact have taken a little longer than that. But that didn’t mark the end of his sleuthing. “What was the original song whose spirit hovers over ‘Chaim’ke’?” he asks. It turns out that Halkin’s memory wasn’t that good. The song in question, “They Were All Out of Step but Jim,” wasn’t a Civil War song, it was from World War I. And it was written by someone who had a lot in common with Chaim’ke: a newly naturalized thirty-year-old draftee serving on Long Island where it was his job to write morale-boosting songs—Irving Berlin.

Berlin’s gently mocking song doesn’t seem like a morale booster. But it does seem rather Jewish, even if Jim is clearly supposed to be Irish. And it’s easy to imagine how Berlin’s observation of Yiddish-speaking recruits on the base might have inspired it. Yet, while that can’t be ruled out, the song’s deepest roots aren’t Jewish at all. Assaf finds one version of the well-traveled and frequently altered joke in a Scottish newspaper, the Dundee Weekly News, in 1891:

A raw country chap joined the volunteers, and on the first parade day his sister came, together with his mother, to see them. When they were marching past, Jock was out of step, “Look mither [mother],” said his sister, “they’re a’ oot of step but oor Jock [they’re all out of step but our Jock].”

For this particular song, that’s the end of Assaf’s road. But his book is full of such joyful detective work, while also being richly insightful about the shifting perceptions of Jewish mothers revealed in Yiddish, Hebrew and even some English songs. In the preface to his previous songbook, Shir hu lo rak milim, Assaf wrotethat he had enough material for another book or maybe even two. One hopes that it is the latter.